92 Winslow Gardens

92 Winslow Gardens relates the author's remarkable nine months in London as a struggling artist. Without funds, work papers, or resources, he struck upon the idea of selling his sketches in the streets of London. But the most remarkable part of his adventurous life was his relationship with an older woman of overwhelming character and beauty. Together they forged a powerful bond that like all great loves existed in a world of their own. Every day was an adventure and together they were ready for anything.

Invisible Gardens is a composite history of the individuals and firms that defined the field of landscape architecture in America from 1925 to 1975, a period that spawned a significant body of work combining social ideas of enduring value with landscapes and gardens that forged a modern aesthetic. The major protagonists include Thomas Church, Roberto Burle Marx, Isamu Noguchi, Luis Barragan, Daniel Urban Kiley, Stanley White, Hideo Sasaki, Ian McHarg, Lawrence Halprin, and Garrett Eckbo. They were the pioneers of a new profession in America, the first to offer alternatives to the historic landscape and the park tradition, as well as to the suburban sprawl and other unplanned developments of twentieth-century cities and institutions. The work is described against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the Second World War, the postwar recovery, American corporate expansion, and the environmental revolution. The authors look at unbuilt schemes as well as actual gardens, ranging from tiny backyards and play spaces to urban plazas and corporate villas. Some of the projects discussed already occupy a canonical position in modern landscape architecture; others deserve a similar place but are less well known. The result is a record of landscape architecture's cultural contribution - as distinctly different in history, intent, and procedure from its sister fields of architecture and planning - during the years when it was acquiring professional status and struggling to define a modernist aesthetic out of the startling changes in postwar America.

Fascinating stories of New Jersey's rich railroading history

This timely study of Winslow Homer highlights his imagery of the Atlantic world and reveals themes of racial, political, and natural conflict across his career. Long celebrated as the quintessential New England regionalist, Winslow Homer (1836–1910) in fact brushed a much wider canvas, traveling throughout the Atlantic world and frequently engaging in his art with issues of race, imperialism, and the environment. This groundbreaking publication focuses, for the first time, on the watercolors and oil paintings Homer made during visits to Bermuda, Cuba, coastal Florida, and the Bahamas—in particular, The Gulf Stream (1899), an iconic painting long considered the most consequential of his career—revealing a lifelong fascination with struggle and conflict. The book also includes Homer’s depictions of rural life and the sea, in which he grapples with the violence of nature, as well as his Civil War and Reconstruction paintings of the 1860s and 1870s, which explore the unresolved effects of the war on the landscape, soldiers, and the formerly enslaved. Recognizing the artist’s keen ability to distill complex issues in his work, Winslow Homer: Crosscurrents upends popular conceptions and convincingly argues that Homer’s work resonates with the challenges of the present day.